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When I sat down to write this, my original intention was actually to express some sympathy for the people who spent months collecting signatures in the recent recall effort.
Let me be clear: I never agreed with the reasoning behind the recall. From the beginning, I viewed it as political targeting of school board members who had the audacity to defeat their liberal counterparts at the ballot box. But disagreement with someone's cause doesn't mean you can't recognize hard work when you see it.
I know firsthand just how difficult petition work can be.
Over the years, I've done my fair share of petition circulating. In fact, as his then-political director, I oversaw the petition project to get Congressman Dan Benishek on the ballot in both 2012 and 2014. During the 2012 campaign, the pressure of that responsibility became so intense that I ended up in the emergency room twice. What I thought were potentially serious medical problems were ultimately diagnosed as severe panic attacks. Why? Because I understood the stakes. I knew that how well I managed that petition project could determine whether the good doctor's name appeared on the ballot--and, potentially, whether Republicans retained the congressional seat. So, when this recall effort came up, I understood what these people were taking on. Signature gathering is not easy. It requires time, persistence, organization and an awful lot of people willing to hear "no" over and over again. That's why, despite disagreeing with the recall, I initially intended to give the organizers credit for their effort and express some sympathy that so much work ultimately came to nothing.
Then I started reading their social media posts and letters to the editor. And somewhere along the way, sympathy gave way to something else.
Because apparently the lesson some of the organizers took from this experience wasn't that petition drives require careful preparation, competent leadership and a thorough understanding of election law. The lesson was: find someone else to blame.
That's where this whole episode becomes particularly interesting.
One circulator targeted our county clerk, claiming the election official simply "adopted a legal interpretation from attorneys" to invalidate signatures. But that's not what happened. The clerk didn't follow an attorney's musings, she followed a 2024 Court of Appeals ruling, Wickman v. Norway Township Clerk, which was upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court in 2025.
The county clerk does not have the authority to write or rewrite the rules or simply ignore the rules because doing so would make someone's political project more convenient. In fact, all she did was follow the law and comply with the legal standards handed down by the courts, and for that she's getting slammed.
It’s a remarkable position to take. Imagine being angry at the referee because your team lost after the referee correctly enforced a rule you didn't bother to learn. But their blame doesn't stop there. Circulators are also going after ordinary citizens by name in letters to the editor. One gentleman obtained copies of the petitions - which are public record - simply wanting to verify whether the signatures collected actually added up--a right he has, and something campaigns on both sides of the aisle do regularly. Yet they insinuated he might do something nefarious with the signatures he obtained. These are the same people asking citizens to trust them with their signatures for a political cause. Yet now they seem to be suggesting that those signatures are somehow unsafe in the hands of a local business professional simply because that person doesn’t share their political views.
That isn’t an argument about election security. That’s fearmongering dressed up as civic concern. And perhaps that is the biggest irony of this entire episode. The people who wanted to use the recall process to hold elected officials accountable now seem remarkably reluctant to apply that same standard to themselves.
Accountability is a wonderful thing-- but in their eyes, only as long as someone else is being held accountable. But that’s not how leadership works. If you organize a petition drive, you own the responsibility for understanding the rules. If you collect signatures, you have a responsibility to make sure those signatures are collected properly. If your effort fails because of legal requirements that could have been anticipated, you don’t get to retroactively assign blame. And if your political strategy fails, you don’t get to rewrite the story afterward so that you are the victim of everyone else’s political agenda.
Ultimately, the organizers of this recall effort are making a very convincing argument--just not the one they probably intended to make. They are convincing voters that when it comes to the school board races this November, to not consider a single candidate they endorse.
Voters prefer candidates and causes that can accept responsibility when things go wrong. They prefer people who can acknowledge mistakes without immediately searching for a political enemy to blame. They prefer those who don’t have to twist the narrative until every failure becomes someone else’s fault.
The petition drive failed. That’s unfortunate for those who worked on it. But failure isn’t the most troubling part. What you do after you fail tells voters considerably more about you than the failure itself.
And in this case, their response has told us everything we need to know.